Defect Triage Meeting

What is Defect Triage?

Defect triage is a process in software testing where it defines the order of defects which will be resolved according to the priority of severity or risks etc. It is also called Bug Triage. It is based on the severity and priority of the defects in software.

Severity means the degree of impact or amount of impact of the defect on the software or part of the application which is tested. Priority indicates the correct order in which the detected defects should be fixed or resolved.

So basically, Defect Triage helps the software testing team if the available resources are very few to fix the bugs in software.

'Triage' is a French word which means 'sorting'. So Defect Triage gives the degree of risk to each bug in software testing. If the number of bugs is too much than the number of testers, then this process automatically tries to fix the bugs as much as possible based on the degree of risks.

Defect Triage Meeting in Software Testing

A defect Triage meeting is a discussion in which testers decide the degree of risks for each bug based on the severity and priority in software testing. The main objective of this meeting is to provide the solution and try to resolve and fix each bug we got during software testing. There may be another kind of question discussion possible, like:

Is the bug we got valid or not?
Defect or bug is worth fixing or not?
When should we fix the bug?
Defect is reproducible or not reproducible?

In Defect Triage Meeting, apart from the discussion, testers divide the bugs into the different sections based on their characteristics to fix them. These are the following categories:

1. Defects to fix now

Those bugs which should be immediately resolved come in this category. These are the bugs which create huge damage to the software or application, so they should be resolved as soon as possible. There are a lot of resources which can fix these bugs immediately.

2. Defects to fix later

Those defects which can be resolved later come in this category. These bugs create very less damage to the software, and they are not too harmful, so that they can be resolved later.

3. Defect we will never fix

All those defects which are not harmful to the software and they need to resolve come in the category.

Sometimes, these bugs are necessary for the software also.

The frequency of the Defect Triage Meeting depends upon the importance of the software and the situation of the project. There are the following factors which determine the frequency of the Defect Triage Meeting:

Total number of bugs in a system
The current health of the project
Schedule of the project
Schedule of the team members and their availability

These are the following points that should be under consideration while fixing the bugs in a system:

Is the bug related to the current and correct project or not?
The information sent by the tester regarding the defect is enough to understand by the developers so that they can work on it without any issues.
The bugs which are found should be categorized into the correct category.
The severity and priority of each defect or bug are assigned properly because Defect Triage only works well when the severity and priority are assigned correctly.